The West no longer rules the waves in Asia

Hugh White

For almost two centuries, the waters around China have been dominated by foreign warships - first British, then American. Time and again those ships were used to send a simple message: ''We may be far away but we can reach out and touch you, so pay attention when we call.'' They called it gunboat diplomacy.

Earlier this month Beijing did some gunboat diplomacy of its own. By sailing three small warships past Australia's outpost on Christmas Island last week, China was telling us the era of the West's maritime predominance is over. It was telling us that China is back as a great power in Asia, and Australia should learn to treat it with the respect that great powers demand.

One can see why Beijing might have wanted to send us this message. Five years ago Tony Abbott wrote in his book Battlelines that China's rise should make no difference to our foreign policy, and he has certainly acted on that basis since winning power. The new government has gone out of its way to show that it does not see China as a rising great power. it has talked down Australia's links with China, and talked up our alignments with the US and Japan, just as rivalry between them and China has escalated.

Now Julie Bishop seems to have got the message from Beijing. Late last week, in commenting on the Chinse naval deployment, she took a very different line. ''China is an emerging power in our region and globally,'' she told the ABC. ''We are in a very different world, it's a changing landscape, and our foreign policy must be flexible enough and nimble enough to recognise that changing landscape.'' This is much more realistic. It is also what Beijing wants to hear.

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But while the government is wise to at last acknowledge the immense strategic significance of China's rise and its profound implications for Australia's foreign policy, it is also important to keep the military developments in our region in perspective. Alarming talk of China ''projecting power'' into Australia's neighbourhood or the wider Indian Ocean is premature, and unhelpful.

To respond intelligently to China's growing power we need to be clear about what exactly it will be able to do in coming decades, and what it won't. The Chinese Navy's Christmas Island cruise tells us little about the shifting balance of real naval combat power in our region, because what navies can do in peacetime is a poor guide to what they could do in a war.

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Sending a few ships on a short peacetime passage with some minor exercises along the way is one thing. Projecting power by sea against a capable adversary is quite another. Military power projection involves moving a lot of big, heavy stuff, which takes a lot of big ships. Those ships are inherently vulnerable to modern weapons systems, because they are easy to find with radar and other sensors, and easy to hit with missiles and torpedoes.

Defending them against these threats is essential to successful power projection, but it is extremely difficult and expensive. This means there is a big difference between projecting power by sea and stopping an adversary from doing so. This difference is key to understanding what is changing in the naval balance of power in Asia today, and what is not.

The big change is that over the past 15 years China has quickly built modern forces and systems that can find and sink other countries' ships - both in the waters around China and, increasingly, far from its shores. This vastly increased capacity for what navies call ''sea denial'' has fundamentally changed the strategic balance in Asia.

By building forces that can sink US ships, the Chinese have sharply cut America's ability to project power by sea against them. That ability has always been the foundation of America's strategic dominance in Asia - and of Britain's before it. So the old era of the West's maritime primacy in Asia is finally over.

But that does not mean a new era of Chinese maritime primacy is about to begin. The technical and operational factors that allow China to achieve sea denial over the US also allow the US to achieve sea denial over China. And not just the US. Smaller countries such as Japan and India will also be able to prevent China projecting substantial military power by sea.

Even Australia, if we made the right investments, could exploit the advantages of geography and technology to give us the capacity for sea denial against China in the waters to our north.

All this has important military and political implications. Militarily, as US naval preponderance in Asia fades, we are moving into a new era in which no country will have the capacity to project power by sea if any of the region's major or even middle powers is determined to stop it. That's good news for Australia and for the rest of Asia.

Politically, it means Asia does not necessarily face the choice between preserving US primacy and accepting Chinese primacy. A region in which no country can project power by sea is one that no country can easily dominate, and in which some form of power-sharing has a good chance of developing.

That means Tony Abbott need not fear that acknowledging China's growing role as a great power in Asia means surrendering to Chinese hegemony. But it does mean we will need a lot more of that flexible and nimble diplomacy that Julie Bishop was talking about.

Hugh White is an Age columnist and professor of strategic studies at the strategic and defence studies centre, ANU.